Fireworks for Lunar New Year celebrations exploded on a truck in central China, destroying part of an elevated highway Friday and sending vehicles plummeting 30 meters to the ground. State media had conflicting reports on casualties.
The huge blast collapsed an 80-meter (80-yard) stretch of a major east-west highway in Mianchi county in Henan Province.
It scattered blackened chunks of debris and shattered the windows of a nearby truck stop. There was no immediate word on the cause of the explosion.
A Communist Party spokesman for the nearby city of Sanmenxia, Nie Jianyin, cited provincial officials as saying that five people were confirmed dead and eight hospitalized.
The Xinhua News agency reported four dead. Earlier reports by China National Radio and some other outlets of up to 26 people killed were later removed from websites.
Photos posted on the website of a Henan newspaper, Dahe Daily, showed a stretch of elevated highway gone, with one truck’s back wheels perched at the edge of a shorn-off section of the highway.
Other photos showed firefighters below spraying water on scorched hunks of concrete, wrecked trucks and flattened shipping containers.
The location is about 90 kilometers (55 miles) west of Luoyang, an ancient capital of China known for grottoes of Buddhist statues carved from limestone cliffs.
AP
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